“New” Tools for Analyzing Social Work Interaction: Using Conversation Analysis As a Methodology in Social Work Research and Practice

Everyday social work practice requires the management and negotiation of talk. In spite of the centrality of social interaction in the field, discourse analytic research and instruction in social work settings is still comparatively scarce. Likewise, applied linguistics has been dominated by research in education and more recently health communication, leading Sarangi and Candlin (2010) to redefine the titular journal of the field, broadening the scope and sounding a clarion call to social work and other institutional researchers. In the spirit of the SSWR conference theme, we argue that discourse analysis, a methodology that attends to the nuances of talk, has the potential to answer questions currently unaddressed in the field.

Discourse analysts have a longstanding tradition of analyzing institutional talk (c.f. Drew & Hertiage, 1992), particularly in social work contexts (Goffman, 1955, 1983; Garfinkel, 1967). In the last thirty years, there has been increased attention to discourse and narrative analysis among social work researchers, particularly in Europe (Hall, Juhila, Parton, Pösö, 2003; Hall, Juhila, Matarese, & van Nijnatten, 2014). Analyses of social work talk inform our understanding of how practitioners verbally categorize “good” and “bad” clients, how clients categorize themselves, how responsibility is negotiated, how boundaries are constructed, how advice is given, how delicate situations are discursively managed, how clients resist, and how clients insist on identities. Discourse analysts, therefore, make essential observations about how talk unfolds in social work contexts, and how that talk communicates something larger about how we “do” social work.

One discourse analytic methodology—conversation analysis (CA) has extensively researched talk in institutional settings (Drew & Heritage, 1992), assessing and providing suggestions for practical problems in the field (Antaki, 2011; Heritage & Robinson, 2011). This workshop will first describe (1) the data recording and transcribing process and (2) a variety of CA analytical tools. We then apply those tools in two distinct research contexts.

The first study examines data gathered in an interactional institutional ethnography of caseworker-client interaction in an urban homeless shelter. Data include audio-recordings from a corpus including 54 interactions between caseworker-client dyads (5 caseworker and 15 client participants) over a 9-month period. We will examine discursive constructions of delicacy, responsibility and insistence in the shelter context, applying previously discussed features of CA and discussing their relevance.

The second study examines how microanalysis (CA) of family discourse data can be useful to counselors by highlighting phenomena such as how implicit criticism, even done unwittingly, can end the conversation or deflect the topic. Data from a longitudinal study of interaction between adult children and their parents show the discursive practices of posing a leading question (problematizing choices), showing appreciation (evaluation), justifying choices, and seeking acknowledgement. These practices can highlight for counselors the subtleties of conversation, show how particular practices are problematic, and lend ideas for analyzing their own or clients’ interactions.

We conclude with a brief discussion of the limitations of CA as a methodology.